Going Down the Last Candy Cane Lane

Every year I plan to not get pulled under by the holiday undertow and every year I pretty much fail. I made towels for my mother and sister because last year they said "you have an embroidery machine, we expected to get towels.." and I do want to give them things I've made. And because I gave them scrap books last year I didn't have time to make cookies so this year I had to make up for that because I couldn't go two years without making any cookies, right?

Anyway, I just got the Art Quilt Workbook from the library and I'm looking forward to some sort of on-going art quilt project in the new year.

Experiment Part 2

I put the experimental blocks away and decided to try the same technique, keeping the fabrics that worked and replacing the ones that didn't. I liked the resulting blocks so much better that I went ahead and made sashing or connecting blocks for the two new blocks. Of course I had to try the new blocks with the original, unloved ones. They actually blended pretty well. I now had the core of a quilt that was pretty interesting to me.

I've now made more blocks, staying with the on point setting. I love the abstract, very colorful look. I became a little obsessed with it last weekend. It is a really neat technique developed by Sandi Cummings

Yes We Did!

Marsala Honey Pears with Gorgonzola

I guess it is that time of year again when I want to cook. This recipe was taken from Nigella Lawson's book Nigella Express and I heard about it on The Chef's Table on WHYY a couple of Saturday's ago.

Serves 2

Ingredients

• 2 Tablespoons Olive Oil (one was enough)
  
• 2 Pears, peel left on and cored
  
• 3 Tablespoons Marsala
  
• 2 Tablespoons Honey
  
• 50g Walnut Halves
  
• 500g Gorgonzola
  (honestly, I don't know what a gram of anything is. I just put some in. Enough that it looked right)

Directions
Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Cut the pears into eighths, leaving the skin but cored.
Fry the pears for 3–4 minutes on each side, or until softened.
Meanwhile, whisk the Marsala and honey together in a cup or small bowl.
Add the Marsala mixture to the pears and allow to bubble and become syrupy.
Transfer the pears to a large serving plate, reserving the syrupy mixture in the pan.
Add the walnuts to the same pan and stir fry them for about a minute, or until they are slightly darkened and sticky all over.
To serve, transfer the walnuts to the serving plate along with any remaining pan juices and place the gorgonzola onto the plate.

This was excellent. we had it with a salad and chicken breast.

Experiment

Instructions in this months AQS magazine. I had time on Sunday to give it a try.

The blocks are sliced up quite a bit but the background fabric still dominated and the peach was my least favorite. It was picked to go the what I thought would act as the focus print. It became the focus instead, leaving the other fabrics sort of stranded and not speaking to each other. So I colored it with some paintsticks. It helped some. The one below isn't colored.

What I liked:
The recombining of the piece, I liked the process and I liked the almost but not quite lined up look
The circle shape
The distorted nine-patch

What I didn't like:
The colors

I want to try again with different fabrics.

Pumpkins Gone Wild

This year on Columbus Day we drove up to Bucks County to bring home pumpkins. I love pumpkins. Round, orange, good-tasting and you can carve them and make them LIGHT UP! I love things that light up.

I couldn't resist the pumpkin-ness or the name of the panel. It is unquilted but I think it is small enough for me to do it on the sewing machine some evening when I'm in an intensely obsessive-compulsive space.

A Weekend in the Sewing Studio

I was entirely on my own this weekend. I could have gone to a class - but I didn't. I had great Joann coupons but they went unused. On Saturday my first stop out of bed was my sewing machine and I turned it on before I had my tea.
I worked on a plaid daisy quilt that has a vaguely green theme so far. I started it last week as this Fall's Library Quilters quilt. It has been on my list of things I want to make for a long time so it is good to start it. It is a Ruth McDowell flower pattern. I saw an example made with chickens around the daisys as a border but I'm just not a chicken kind of girl. I'm thinking bees or butterflys -- maybe both and a
bee hive or two? I've been wanting to do something with bees since they started disappearing. I don't know that this will completely satisfy me but it is a possibility.

Several weeks ago I spotted silk chiffon on sale for cheap on Fourth Street. I didn't buy it the day I saw it and it has haunted me since so last week I took an afternoon and bought some in every color! My idea is to make needle felted scarves. Roving looks so cool and organic felted into sheer silk and I have never tried it. I am fairly pleased with the (as yet not completely finished) results.


I also finished the white linen drapes for the bed room. Not as exciting but they SO needed to be finished.


Interspersed with this flurry of creative activity I spent a bit of time cleaning up the space (mostly putting new fabric away) and musing over ways to use some of the large prints I've accumulated in the past year or so.

I am particularly in love with the beautiful collaged-looking prints of Jason Yenter. I can't seem to get enough of them! He creates a new line and I need to have it -- but what to do with it? The prints are either large or intricate or both and after I get them home I am overcome with an attack of the "can't-use-its." The manufacturer (Free Spirit) always has suggested quiting patterns on their web site but the designs tend to be some variation on traditional quilting patterns. I do love and will piece traditional patterns but these prints seems to call for something different so I have been on a mission to find or make a new approach for these and other large prints.

In Memory of Helen Kelley

I went the the Quilter's Newsletter magazine web site to renew my subscription and to my dismay I saw the announcement that Helen Kelley had passed away September 1st. I always read and enjoyed her column. Her positive outlook and measured perspective did feel like my grandmother and her sisters. They were also needle women. Their idea of amusing a 4 year old girl was a needle and thread, a box of assorted buttons and a length of fabric. I have to say that it worked. Those very things still amuse me nearly 50 years later.

I think about the future of women and what my grandmother called "hand work." I know my greats and grands thought about it and from her writings I think Helen Kelley thought about it too because to quilt and to show your work, to quilt and to write about it is to advocate for your craft in a way. To want to pass it on.

I'll miss Helen.

Mother's Meditation

My Mother was telling me about her latest projects the other evening on the phone. She isn't piecing quilts much these days. She isn't feeling like sewing on the machine. She is working on embroidering crazy quilted items. She tells me that she enjoys the hand work.

I know just what she means. Hand work is repetitive yet progressive, limited but accumulative, mindless but meditative. When I do it, nearly always binding a quilt, it sometimes actually feels joyful in a quiet way. Part of that may be finishing the quilt (!) but I also think that hand sewing is a kind of meditation.

So picture it, generations of women, my grandmothers, their mothers and back further and further. In their little print aprons, in their dark poplin dresses with their high, black leather shoes, in their corsets, in their bonnets, in their petticoats and crinolines: a long line of women stretching back focused on their needle and thread, meditating. As surely as if they were sitting cross-legged on the floor in saris or white cotton robes.

Real Feminist Women Rally in Alaska

I try to keep my politics and my quilting separate because it makes me happier but NOTHING is making me happy with the state of our democracy right now. This YouTube video came the closest anything has for days. I could actually feel my spirits lift!

Spontaneous, Layered and Collaged

A triptych of collaged quilts by Julie Haddrick of Australia. Layered images and techniques. Some photo transfers, painted hand-dyed colored base, bleached or painted text: maybe both.

Raw-edged applique that is actually built up here to create the wonderful nest effect.

More meandering raw-edge appliqué, thread "scribbling," scattered beads, other and more seemingly random elements combine to give this quilt the spontaneous feel of a personal journal, a graffiti'd wall, a collection of seemingly casual but skillfully created detail that make a lovely, very contemporary, composition.

Not a Sunflower or a Bird

Lest I give the impression that I only favor birds and sunflowers neither appear here.

Made by Kay Haerland from Australia the textures are outstanding. The piece includes stenciling, painting, rusting and burning. She also did something she calls "interlacing on Solvy." Her materials were lace, fleece, tulle, Tyvek, batiks, Ultrasuede, wool, and more. This quilt won a blue ribbon for "Best Use of Color."

Beyond the texture this quilt is not really dimensional but the thread work is so exquisite here the mouse looks 3-d.

More Favorites

I guess they are all my favorites, or at least interesting to me, or I wouldn't take pictures of them but this quilt is so beautiful it called out to me from across a crowded busy room!

It is called Ravens Return and was created by Terry Kramzar of Pennsylvania. It is, of course, an original design, put together by machine using raw-edge appliqué, fusing and piecing. Some commercial fabrics, some hand-dyed. A particularly wonderful detail is the machine quilting in the centers of the large sunflowers. The artist has chosen to quilt small irregular circles, like seeds, using variegated thread in autumnal colors. The shading on the ravens is pretty outstanding too.

My Favorites

Sharon H. Schlotzhauter from Colorado Springs, Colorado was awarded a Judges Choice Ribbon in the Innovative Category and made one of my favorite quilts of the show.

The center motif is taken from a photo and painted. The borders appear to be pieced. The machine quilting is particularly effective. It creates the effect of another border inside the inner curved one.
I love the bird theme, the spiky border and the hand-dyed looking marbled effect of the fabric.

A Trend? Skinny Quilts

Or maybe more of a mini trend. There was a Skinny Quilts! - The Eclectic Threads Quilters exhibiton but maybe also more narrow pieces than usual. They convinced me they were something beyond table runners.
Here are some of the offical skinny quilts.I particularly loved these three and you can see why you could not begin to think of these as table runners. They wonderfully detailed quilt collages. Left, The End of Our Civilization by Henrietta Curtis. Made from fabric, plastic. paper, felt and stitching.

Middle, The Vessel by Eleanor Levie; fabric, ribbon, tulle and vintage quilt fragments.
Right, String Beans by Eleanor Levie, cotton, lace, various sheer fabrics.

Its Fall! Pennsylvania Quilt Extravaganza 2008

Ok. Summer's officially over now. We went to Europe, we went to the shore, I gardened...but now its time to look at quilt, to sew quilts, to long for new machines (a new Bernina, a long arm quilting machine!) and the kick off is the Pennsylvania Quilt Extravaganza 2008. So here it comes:

Sunflowers, always one of my very favorite subjects. This is a colorful yet soulful. Raw-edged hand-dyed applique on pieced batiks by Elaine Quehl.

Detail.

Summer No Sew

Well, there is nothing going on here, now is there? First there was a really amazing trip to Italy: Naples, Pompeii, Positano, Tuscany, Florence, San Gigmiano and finally Venice. It really was the trip of my lifetime. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would and I learned so many unexpected things. I am blogging about the trip itself here.

It might have some influence on my future life as a quilter and maker of things. Now I'm looking forward to the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza, my favorite quilt show.

All the Floors of Europe

I have seen several quilts inspired by European floors and, while the quilts themselves are striking I never really got the fascination. After seeing the cathedral floors in Florence, Venice and Rome I have a new appreciation of the inspiration.
These particular floors are from the cathedral in Florence.



It is so easy to see the quilt in these. I've been looking at my hand-dyed fabric with new eyes.

Where I've Been

Well, not for a month but for about two weeks. It was amazing. More pictures to come (its Venice!).

Life, Post-Vacation

Last week was vacation time. I had a week away from my day job! I kicked it off with the trip to the State Quilt Guild of New Jersey show. The weather here was idyllic and I gardened and spent some time outside and in Center City. My ambition was to sew and finish one of my projects but that didn't happen. My work room was a mess and with more time on my hands than usual I couldn't focus on completing tasks. I got distracted by cleaning up and weeding my workspace. It needed to be done and I have no regrets - although it would have been nice to have finished something!

One fibrous thing I did get to do was splash around with with fabric dye and cotton yardage.

These are mostly African cotton jacquard. This one started out white. I've linked the larger picture because if you look closely you can sort of see some of the woven pattern.

This one started as a goldenrod yellow. I discharged some of the color by pouring bleach on it. The fabric was crumpled. No attempt made to pattern the discharge. Then rose brown dye was squeezed on from a squirt bottle.

This one started as the same goldenrod. I folded it up into a little triangular package and poured crimson on it.
Again the goldenrod. This time I discharged the color with dishwashing liquid on a big foam stamp -- probably meant to stamp on a wall. Then came emerald green dye on the discharged areas, allowed to do as it wanted. I particularly like over-dyeing the colored fabric. It is a rich effect that is hard to mess up!

White cotton broadcloth that I traced little scientific-ish illustrations onto with a sharpie. The sharpie was not fine enough to give a really fine line but I wanted to see what would happen and from that perspective it worked. The images made it through the entire fabric-punishing process. It is a technique that has some potential.

First Place, Bed Quilt, Applique

This is a prize winner and the simple cookie cutter applique in sort of geometric, reproduction fabric (Kaffe Fassette) includes lots of fun shapes designed by the artist.

New York Beauty-like

Karen Stone pattern. Beaded, machine quilted. This one won first place, larger group.

First Place, Innovative

Painted? Printed? I don't think it's pieced? Very compelling to look at and the outline and textural quilting add much.

Quilt Show

It was a beautiful day and I saw some lovely quilts.



This won first place for Wall Quilt, Appliqué. I think the flower petals at least are raw-edge covered with satin stitch. Some of the other parts of the flower have more textural stitches around the edges. The center is outlined with chenille yard with bugle beads in the middle. Very pretty.
The wavy grid in the background may stitched down butted edge to edge? There are other bead embellishments also.